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MOLYNEUX S QUESTION ANSWERED!
by
Brian Glenney
________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(PHILOSOPHY)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Brian Glenney

In this dissertation I argue that some of our visual and tactile experiences of the external world are exhausted by spatial content. For instance, some of our visual experiences of shape are not 'colored in', but are seen as just shapes out in the external world -- what I call "spatial experience". This provides grounds for sensory knowledge of objects in the external world which is not corrupted by sense-specific content like color and texture.; The possibility of spatial experience resolves the three-century old problem known as Molyneux's question: whether the newly sighted recognize tactilely familiar shapes by sight alone. Given the resounding evidence from Developmental Science in support of an affirmative answer to Molyneux's question, the question has changed from 'whether' to how the newly sighted recognize the shapes. I answer that the newly sighted are able to recognize the shapes because they have spatial experiences of them -- the same type of experiences of shape by sight and touch.; I set my answer in the context of other plausible affirmative answers given by Leibniz, Adam Smith, Gareth Evans, Jesse Prinz, and John Campbell. I argue that these answers fail to guarantee that newly sighted subjects actually experience this sameness and thereby recognize the shapes as the same. These answers only provide possible bases for the sameness of the shape properties of visual and tactile shape perception or the basis for how different shape properties might connect up. Only recognition of shapes based on spatial experience guarantees an affirmative answer to Molyneux's Question.

MOLYNEUX S QUESTION ANSWERED!
by
Brian Glenney
________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(PHILOSOPHY)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Brian Glenney